Obtaining enough biomass from the forests of Cook County would be a cinch if a biomass heating plant were built for the bulk of the public and commercial buildings in Grand Marais. This was the word at an update on a study funded by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources for Cook County and Ely held July 10, 2012 at the U.S. Forest Service in Grand Marais.
Howard Hedstrom, president of Hedstrom Lumber Company of Grand Marais and on lumber industry boards at the state and national level, said the pulpwood industry—which manufactures paper—is on the decline, and new markets are needed for the wood in Cook County. If it isn’t harvested, it will rot and die. He said a lot of the big logs leaving the woods are hollow in the middle–all rotted out.
Dennis Becker of the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources, one of the study’s researchers, had good news: new markets are looking for clean wood chips. He is expecting the logging industry to respond by re-tooling for this new market, and the equipment they will be using could also be used to supply biomass for a local biomass plant.
Like Minnesota, Sweden has no fossil fuel of its own, said Magnus Ånstrand of SveBio, a Swedish association that helps connect biomass businesses with each other and the consumer market. When the biomass industry took off in Sweden, it took into account how they could use byproducts of the wood industry that weren’t being used already.
Businesses in the Swedish biomass industry specialize over there, Ånstrand said, so that small operations do not need to invest in such a wide variety of equipment. For instance, loggers only bring wood and slash to the roadside, where other businesses pick it up.
According to the study, when the cost of the system is spread out over 20 years, a district wood-chip-fueled heating plant for the public buildings along Fifth Street in Grand Marais, the North Shore Dairy and Laundromat, and the courthouse would cost less within the first year—including payments on the system and the price of the biomass fuel—than the current cost of fossil fuel. “The annual fuel costs savings are so substantial, in fact,” said Becker, “that it’s enough to cover the annual capital investment of a new heating system for the public buildings in the first year….”
Adding the underground piping and the cost of hookups to cover the downtown business district would bring the payback period to 10 or 15 years. In order to make the inclusion of the downtown area financially feasible, a “critical mass” of businesses would need to hook up to the system.
Besides financial savings, the community might find other compelling reasons to construct such a plant, however, such as reducing forest fire hazard and improving the health of the forest, decreasing environmental damage from fossil fuel use, and building local industry.
According to Mark Spurr of FVB Energy, a company started 40 years ago in Sweden that helps organizations create and operate energy utilities, questions that still need to be answered relate to where the capital to build a plant would come from, how many customers would sign up for the long haul, and what revenue would be in relationship to production costs.
Cook County Commissioner Fritz Sobanja said he thought local residents would be most concerned about the smoke a biomass plant might emit. “No matter what you say to some people,” he said, “what they’re going to envision is their neighbor’s barrel stove burning garbage.”
Biomass boilers give off far fewer emissions than the plants of years ago, said Katie Fernholz, executive director of Dovetail Partners, which is leading the study.
A summary of research findings distributed at the meeting stated that per unit of energy, the emission levels from wood fuels are higher for certain air pollutants but lower for others. “Overall environmental impacts, including human health impacts, linked to wood fuels have been found to be significantly lower than the impacts linked to use of fossil fuels,” it stated.
“I’ve never been to a facility in Sweden where I’ve smelled smoke,” said Ånstrand. He said what comes out of chimneys is mostly water vapor. You can have some environmental impact locally with biomass or you can have a lot of impact somewhere else with fossil fuels, he said, “and it will come back to you.”
As the study nears completion this fall, the findings will be discussed at public meetings in Cook County. Also being investigated is the feasibility of smaller types of biomass systems for individual homes and businesses.
If the community decides to continue pursuing a biomass plant, the next step would be to do a market assessment, create a business plan, and start on design.
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